As someone whose football allegiances are of the professional variety, from time to time I have to suffer through college football beat writers and bloggers saying something along the lines of, “Here’s a secret: College football is the superior football. Why? Because CFB is more damn fun.” (Fine, they’re directquotes.)

How exciting was watching the 2013 BCS National Championship Game? This is what I discussed with my friends while watching Alabama dismantle Notre Dame:

A family vacation to the Cayman Islands over the holidays.
Environmental damages caused to coral reefs by cruise ships.
My friend’s possible upcoming vasectomy.
Pros and cons of vasectomies.
Pregnancy dangers for women in their forties.
A tale of a friend getting a vasectomy and then being punched in the balls by one of his kids when he got home from the hospital.
Head coaching for the Browns.
Head coaching for the Bears.
Mike Singletary. (In all honesty, we spent way too much time talking about Singletary.)
Cavs-Bulls game.
Oral history of the “Jay Culter is a cat” joke.
Pitchers and catchers reporting in thirty-odd days.
The Cubs winning the World Series in 2015.
Did someone just pick the Cubs in 2015 because that was the plot of BACK TO THE FUTURE II?
Filming a commercial and working with a fake baby.
Possessed doll impersonations.
Why is it no one wants Lovie anyway?
Urlacher retirement.
Why it’s okay to root for the Patriots since Gisele Bundchen saved Sidney Crosby.
OH HEY LOOK THE TWO BAMA GUYS ARE FIGHTING EACH OTHER THANK GOODNESS SOMETHING IS HAPPENING IN THIS GAME, PASS THE JALAPENO POPPERS BECAUSE IT’S GETTING SPICY IN HERE.
The proper way to give a handshake and people who are jerks about handshakes.
Women greeting hugs.
Pervs looking for boob smashes in greeting hugs.
President Bill Clinton boob hugs and handshakes.
People taking dumps on the sidewalk in Echo Park.
Thank goodness the college football season is over and we can get back to the NFL.
Super Bowl party plans.
When was the last exciting BCS title game anyway?

Not a very exciting night of chatter, but it was still more appealing than anything we were watching on the field in Miami. By the time Alabama was up 21-0 early in the second quarter, the bar began to empty. When the score reached 35-0, we were one of the last groups left. Final score 42-14 and none of us could say who had scored for the Irish.

There wasn’t even a field goal attempt from either team, which sounds awful to wish for because, well, college kickers, but at least a kick would have added some drama. Nope. Nothing. Not a single wide right.

And we can expect more of the same from the “superior” football the coming years. Nick Saban has a stranglehold on recruiting, the BCS playoff is still two years and four days away, and what is the biggest pastime during the college season aside of excessive bourbon drinking? Conference realignment. Woooo-eee doogie does college sports love conference realignment. It’s so exciting, conference realignment talk happens all year long. Should San Diego State stay in the Mountain West or go to the Big East? How about staying in one conference for basketball and another for football? What should we name our new conferences? What should we name the divisions in our new conferences? What about historic rivalries? Can’t mess with that Army-Cornell spat that’s been brewing since World War I. Holy shit is that exciting to college football fanatics. Not even baseball geeks can keep up that level of interest in divisional changes.

Where does that leave the NFL fan and their subpar boring football? Well in Super Bowl XLVI, the last five minutes of the game gave the Giants a 21-17 victory over the Patriots, a finish that held the possibility of New England winning on the last play of the game with a Hail Mary pass. Super Bowl XLV in 2011? Green Bay and Pittsburgh fought to 28-25 in the fourth quarter before the Packers were able to wrap it up for a final score of 31-25, a fumble away from a Steelers victory. (Two-point conversion late in the game for Pittsburgh, if the tension wasn’t already ratcheted high enough.) Super Bowl XLIV champs New Orleans Saints didn’t have a lead against the Colts until the fourth quarter, so don’t let the final box score of 31-17 fool you, Indianapolis was winning 17-16 going into home stretch in one of the tightest NFL finals ever. The Steelers and Santonio Holmes tiptoed past the Arizona Cardinals 27-23 in Super Bowl XLIII, a game that saw defender James Harrison run back a 100-yard interception for possibly one of the best fat man touchdowns in history. Giant David Tyree catching the ball against his helmet in a drive that would lead to New York upsetting New England 17-14. Patriots 24, Eagles 21. Colts-Bears went into the half 16-14. Patriots 32, Panthers 29. Just typing out this paragraph has my heart pounding, my mind racing back through the highlights, and giving me the sudden urge to rewatch any Super Bowl that isn’t Super Bowl XXX.

You have to go back a decade to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 48-21 win over the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl XXXVII for the last blowout in the NFL championship. College? Alabama has outscored Texas, LSU and Notre Dame 100-35 in the three national championships they’ve played in since 2009. Sure, Auburn-Oregon and Texas-USC were tight games, but in there you’ve also got Florida killing Ohio State and USC’s (vacated) 55-19 win over Oklahoma.

Of course we should never confuse exciting and fun football and good football. Alabama is playing undeniably good football. Football is usually so destructive, it’s easy to forget how pretty it can be when one team is at its peak and the other team is Notre Dame, to paraphrase my friend Pete Holby. What generally makes college football appealing are familial connections and the farcical manner in which it is covered by prominent online writers and even by the networks. The circus is fun and I adore my friends who cover college football dearly. (I even shared the title of this post with one of them at 1 AM just so I could properly be called a harlot to be sure I was on the right track.)

But was the game fun? No, not really. What makes college football exciting is that so much of it is so poorly played, TCU-Michigan State for example, anything can happen.

So no, college football is not superior football. The NFL is not boring. It’s winning at the end of the season to make the playoffs. It’s not looking too far ahead at Brady versus Manning because both the Ravens and Texans could play spoiler. It’s Green Bay playing on the road in sunny California against the 49ers instead of in the storied cold Wisconsin air. It’s Seattle playing some of the strongest football anyone has seen in recent memory.

The best part? NFL fans still have another four weekends of football to go. So my hope is the NFL isn’t so beneath your football love that you won’t watch the fun, college fans. Because I think it’s some pretty damn good fun.

I’m on the clock until my vasectomy, and at the consult the doc tells me they do ’em on Fridays so “you can go home and rest all weekend before going back to work.”

I looked at him and said, “I work in academia; I sit around for 3/4 of my day, and pace slowly in the front of a classroom for a couple hours a week. On weekends, I chase around my 3 year-old while playing hot potato with my 6 week-old who is trying to set a Guinness record for weight gain. Seriously, can we do the procedure on a Monday?”

It affects different teams in different ways. I’d just like to see teams actually get to face off against each other in their regular rhythms. I mean, no other sport has this much layoff between regular season and Championship round.

Almost every SB since FA was established has been great while most before it were jokes. There isn’t league wide parity in the manner the media hacks go on about as teams like the Chiefs, Bills, Browns, Lions can’t ever seem to unfuck themselves. There IS a great deal of parity among teams that actually know what they are doing and FA is a big part of this and a big part of why the SB has lived up to the hype for over a decade.

Sports is pretty much the only thing people try to convince themselves/others that amateurs are somehow better than professionals, right?

“Bro, forget about Justified tonight. Me and three buddies dicked around in front of a camera for two hours. Check out our passion! We’re doing it because we love acting, not because anyone’s paying us.”

Bands. It is almost a given that once you sign a contract, you have sold out. And if you want to generate any hipster cred, you have to start any conversation about music with a nod to some obscure band and the claim, “Well, you probably have not heard of them yet…”

Because you’d never hear a bunch of off-topics being discussed during the Super Bowl? You are basically being the annoying girlfriend who wants to leave this stupid Super Bowl party already because this football stuff is soooo boring.

The entirety of the college football season is more fun, yes. If you cherry-pick and tune in the just for the last game that has a ton of flaws and warts and is in the process of being revised and overhauled, then yes you are going to make sweeping one sided judgements. College football had more exciting games in the regular season this year (Bama/LSU, Stanford/Oregon, Bama/Tex AM, So Car/Mich, UGA/Bama off the top of my head) I can’t think of too many NFL games during the season that really resonated at all. Plus you have actual upsets so people are actually surprised when Louisville beats Florida, Baylor beats Kansas State, and NC State knocks off Florida State. Those games ruin entire seasons, winning is paramount every week. While Arizona beats NE? Meh, Peter King can’t remember that far back. Let’s just try not to lose 7 or 8 games and we should be in.

The entirety of the college football season is more fun?
Like when Alabama kicks the piss out of Middle EasternCarolina Technical school? Or at the end of the season when they don’t play any games for 6 weeks?

College football had more exciting games
Some of those games were more exciting, but at the end of the day it still pitted a two equally sub-par teams to what you see in the NFL. By the same token the most exciting game played this year would be a 6 OT game between the #1 and #2 Pop Warner teams in VA

And the idea that winning is Paramount every week rings so hollow when the moment you lose your second game (or in some cases first) you have no shot at a total. This will also not change going into the playoff format because a number of quality 1 and 2 loss teams wouldn’t challenge for a title.

College Football sucks. But since you are a Browns fan I suppose I can see why you might like it – since its so close to your NFL experience and all.

Obviously the talent is superior in the NFL, I hope so. I’m not going to define what makes a professional versus and amateur. That doesn’t have anything to do with what makes a game exciting, hence why the 1994 Texas State High School Football Championship game ending was posted here every year around the holidays (disappointed it wasn’t this year)

Here it is:

Yea the sample size is bigger, so what? Is more football a bad thing?

All I’m saying is that the NFL is largely the same week in and week out. Nobody was shocked when the defending champs lost to the Cowboys to start the season. The Titans and Jaguars being guaranteed to play twice a year doesn’t really move the needle just because they are professionals.

And if you think things like fight songs, traditions, bands are dumb extraneous BS that have nothing to do with the football being played then you can say that about fantasy football, NFL draft coverage, various annual lockouts, and Bountygate scandals.

Yea I get it, it’s just a wider net not a better fisherman. But nobody watches every game, and there’s nothing wrong with being treated to some game totally off your radar that is a shootout or in double overtime. You also get exposed to these players for crappy teams like “Colin Kaepernick” and “Robert Griffin III” and think they are fun to watch.

Yes the lofty goal of going 6-6 and making a bowl game is weak, but that has more to do with crazy growing corporate sponsor like in all sports, and America’s delight to just have more football on around the holidays, no matter what the matchup. Coaches still get fired for losing 6 games and making a bowl, it is often viewed as an unacceptable mark for any program that has a pulse.

The answer is easy — more bad football games is not better than a few good ones. For every marquee matchup in CFB there are 40 shitty ones. Most college football is two meh teams playing in front of 7000 drunk students. It might be more fun for the folks who attend the games, but as far as watchability from a disinterested party … not so much.

I don’t think “watchability from a disinterested party” is the metric we should be aiming to measure anything with. Seeing Chiefs/Chargers and Dolphins/BIlls twice this year is not exactly anybody’s idea of pure entertainment either. Presenting the worst games you have the offer someone who doesn’t care isn’t the right answer.

Didn’t realize Sarah wrote the post until after I commented, or that typing “girlfriend” counted as raging misogyny. Definitely crossed a line How about “annoying significant other” just to make things way more PC?

you totally miss the point by bringing in the term PC… how about not pigeonholing women as people who can’t be sports fans? Or taking a fucking argument on face value rather than assigning masculinity or femininity to an action?

Postscript, bitching about things being “PC” is the last resort of a person with nothing left to say. How about being decent to people instead of tossing around shitty things to say about them based on non-existent stereotypes?

That’s messed up. Go back and read some more of her stuff and come in with perspective. Furthermore, she is the mathematical opposite of “annoying girlfriend” and made a case for each of her damn arguments. Your ship got sunk.

Ugh now I remember why commenting on the internet is a terrible waste of time. I could go back and read KSK posts that talk about freakin’ “pussytubing” but me typing “annoying girlfriend” which is a lazy stock character out a Chuck Lorre sitcom and I’m an awful person. Got it.

Firstly, GREAT hate hustle today guys. I thought I was in a pissy mood and needed to take a break from the stress off work, and I come to KSK and I’m all like “Whoa, you guys should probably chill out a bit.”

/slaps Moose on the ass, HARD!
//gets wierded out by how much Moose seems to enjoy it

Secondarily, the worst part of CFB (aside from the obviously inferior talent and, therefore, gameplay) is the fact that the games are played on fucking SATURDAY. I have shit to do people. I already spend all day Sunday drinking and yelling at the TV. Saturdays are for drinking at the beach, or the pool, or wherever the fuck you drink when it’s cold, I don’t know, I live in Florida. This is why CFB is perfect for people that live in godawful wastelands of dirty brown water trash like South Bend, Alabama, or Cleveland, and those of us that live within 100 miles of anything fun to do tend prefer the NFL.

As someone who watches both, there’s no way that you can argue that NFL as a whole puts out a better product per week, per game. That’s the result of parity.

What college football offers is sheer volume, which means of the 60-80 games a week, a few of them could be pretty damn good. And because there’s such a huge diversity, teams play with more abandon – more risk, more likely to try something bizarre, whether or not it works.

And fairly often, something completely unexpected happens. I myself love those unexpected upsets, like when Louisville kicks Florida’s balls in so hard they shoot out of Tebow’s ears.

Actually, I kinda enjoyed yesterday’s game, because I hate Notre Dame, and because I was working and had the game on in the background. I admit, had I been at a party specifically to watch the game, we’d probably have ended up playing Xbox or something by the third quarter, after the Irish’s humiliation was well underway.

^ just bowl execs who put money in their pockets from schools who lose money on going to bowl. Most LOSE 100s of thousands of dollars to go because their fans by aftermarket tix for 10 bucks instead of the outrageous face value tix from schools.

yes, because Auburn/LSU/Sakerlina/etc. fans who vociferiously chant SEC! SEC! like their school won the national title when Alabama is winning BCS title games TOTALLY isn’t fairweather fandom at all. Nope. Not in the least.

I enjoy college football, but HATE HATE HATE the dumb fuck bowl system. OHH HEY LET’S PLAY ALL OUR BEST TEAMS IN EXHIBITIONS AND DON’T HAVE A SHOT AT THE TITLE BECAUSE WE HAVE TO PLAY THE “BEST” AGAINST EACH OTHER TO “SAVE THE REGULAR SEASON” LIKE GAMES BETWEEN ALABAMA AND BUMFUCK STATE.

I cannot wait for the playoff. Cannot fucking wait. Needs to be 8 teams, however. How can we have such a beautiful thing like the NCAA tourney or even a d2 and d3 playoff where we root for underdogs, but hat them so much in college football.

I am getting angrier every word type. /thinks about college hockey //smiles

the periphery of college football is better. basically, heading back to school and tailgating while wondering which broads are 18 then feeling incredibly creepy and wondering “HOW THE F$%K DID I GET SO OLD” so booze will get rid of the creepiness right and passing out under a car and missing the game entirely and losing your cell phone so you can’t call your wife who is waiting at the door when you get home with your kids covered in their own filth and the harsh reality sets in that you just want to curl up in a ball and die because there is nothing left in life but work work work crushing work and the kids won’t stop screaming and the state won’t let you chain them to the roof of the house and they are too young to be cleaning the gutters and you seriously want to tell your wife “hey i’m going out to get smokes” and then go to mexico to sweet sweet freedom.

I think what makes me like the NFL and college basketball better than college football and the NBA is the same thing. Both of the former are less dependent on one player to win a championship. You will never have a one-man team like Vince Young Texas or Cam Newton Auburn win in the NFL. It helps to have an awesome QB like Brees or Manning or Brady, but you still have to have a defense and quality receivers. QB roll-outs don’t win championships.

Similarly, you rarely have a one-man team win in NCAA basketball, but the NBA has basically been Jordan, Shaq, LeBron, etc. forever, and NBA fans don’t even like good “teams” like the Spurs.

I guess it all comes down to taste at the end of the day, and that is just my taste.

I love the NBA and NFL. I can watch College Football and appreciate it. I HATE College Basketball except for the Final Four. I detest most CBB because that is not how the game should be played to me. They slow the game down to a snails pace, rely primarily on a short three point distance, and i find the defensive rotations to be largely atrocious. Basically it’s like watching Carlos Boozer on defense and a terrible Kyle Korver on offense.

I do agree with you on the you need a “team” to win instead of one transcendent talent. Although your examples are a little off as all the people you mentioned had another Hall of Famer playing with them. The Spurs have/had Ginobli, Duncan, and an on his last leg Robinson.

If Division I fixes their joy-squashing BCS and institutes a proper playoff system, THEN it has the potential to be as exciting as the NFL.

The FCS, while admittedly consisting of inferior teams, has a far more exciting postseason because ANY team who makes it in has a chance to win the whole thing. Nothing is guaranteed just because you finished with one of the top two regular-season records.

Case in point: I got to enjoy Villanova beating Montana in the final round in 2009 to win the national championship, and they earned it the old-fashioned way.

Also, the NFL doesn’t consistently wrap itself in the hypocrisy of making millions off the sweat of its unpaid laborers while blatantly attempting to falsely promote itself as the bastion and protector of amateur athletics.

Also, the term scholar-athlete, especially when used for Reggie Bush, Cam Newton, etc, always makes me laugh. Fuck you NCAA.

I dont understand how I am supposed to care about College Football when I never attended a four year university nor had any family attend one.

Where’s my connection or vested interest? I enjoy some of the individual plays because it’s still essentially awesome football visuals, but beyond that the insane amount of teams and incredibly high player turnover (due to graduation / transfer / weedf) just confuses me

It makes sense. Why do you like the Bears? You grew up there, your family and friends like or liked them, they are covered extensively by the Chicago, etc. Same thing for a kid growing up in Huntsville, AL or Austin, TX. When the college team gets the coverage over pro teams, they get a lot of fans.

This wasn’t exactly a banner postseason/bowl season for the SEC either, the 2nd and 4th best (going solely by ranking) teams lost to lower ranked ACC and Big East opponents, South Carolina needed a last second TD to beat a Big Ten team, and Georgia was also in a pretty competitive game against another one. The only reasons Bama was playing in this game are 1) Les Miles is the Andy Reid of College Football and 2) Georgia fucked it up.

I personally think it’s going to be a Pac-12 team that breaks the SEC streak. Of course I realize that we probably going to have to suffer through a couple of Urban Meyer-Nick Saban BCS Championship.

Fucking love this post.
It seems like almost every time I watch a college game it ends in a blowout, so I MATH’D it out.
Week 1 College Games: Out of 78 games played, the winning team won by an average of 22.23 points. I’m sure it would’ve been higher, if not for the fact that TWO games ended in 0-0 ties… EXCITING STUFF PEOPLE
Week 1 NFL Games: Out of 16 games played, the winning team won by an average of 11.81 points.
So there it is, mathematical proof that on average, the NFL has more exciting games.
/Someone else can do a bigger sample size, its early

I do like the relative affordability of seeing a college game ($400 for season tickets) and the fact I don’t have to drive two and a half hours to get to a stadium. But when I’m watching my beloved Badgers punt from the opponent’s 37 yard line because both kickers are fucking terrible, well you won’t catch me singing the hosannas of the college game.

I go to the Univeristy of Oklahoma, and I get so much fucking shit for telling people that I love the NFL in a way I could never love CFB. I have no desired to buy season tickets to watch Landry Jones throw 7 TD’s against Florida A&M and then have my classmates act like we ARE DESTINED FOR THE CHAMPIONSHIP.

Also, what really pisses me off is the big CFB fans then transfer player allegience to the NFL. Which means that when I wear Packer shit all I hear is “You don’t love the Vikings for AD you Northern faggot?”

Also, local FOX shows fucking Rams games all the time because people wanna see Sam Bradford I guess.

SoC&S: I live in Jacksonville, the NFL has always been my one true love in sports entertainment, and I went to a University that doesn’t even HAVE a football team, so I get it. Trust me [sigh]…I get it.

Look on the bright side: at least you don’t live in Alabama. These assclowns were insufferable before last night. Now we’ll be treated to endless, hysterical rants about “Alabama, the greatest football team that has ever been or will ever be.” It’s really tedious..

I totally agree with Moose: it’s simply a matter of taste. Living in Alabama now, I’ve grown to appreciate college football. The quality of gameplay isn’t quite as good, for sure, but it’s a helluva lot of fun. A game can still be exciting even if it doesn’t have the best possible athletes on the field. That is why football is such an awesome sport. And for all the talk about the so-called “extraneous” stuff about the college game: that’s precisely what makes it fun. Fans are way more attached to their teams because these are places they spent 4 years of their lives at, their whole family has ties to, and is imbricated with the identity of their region. The whole “S-E-C” crap that annoys everyone? That’s a product of Southern resentment pushing back against perceived Yankee elitism, which culminated in years of Southern teams getting pissed on in the polls by sportswriters. Doesn’t make it justified, but it demonstrates the historical and cultural ties to the college game that the pros don’t have. And I totally understand if you don’t give two shits about that stuff if you don’t have a part in it. The NFL, quite frankly, cannot touch that, and that’s fine because it doesn’t have to nor tries to be. If you don’t have a rooting interest in it, of course you’ll think the games are boring or the system unbelievably arcane.

One last element about the college game though, that hasn’t been discussed here: the teams have actual fucking identities unlike the modern NFL. Every NFL team is or tries to be a QB-centered pass-oriented offense that runs a hybrid of the West Coast offense. It’s the lone sad product of FA parity and the rule changes that favor offenses: every damn team looks the same. In college, you have everything ranging from crazy shit like Oregon’s frenetic fire drill of an offense to the Air Raid systems of Texas A&M or West Virginia to the pistol spread of Nevada to the service academies’ triple option to Alabama’s ace formation-heavy power-running schemes. It makes the bowl games awesome, to see which schemes work.

Again, I love both, but I love them differently. To apply the standards you have for one on the other is simply tedious and misses the point: you have an excuse to watch more football.

Love this post. I watch college football to fill in the gaps on my NFL watching. This year did not seem as interesting to me, and many of the bowl games I just turned off. Can’t think of one bowl game this year that got me fire up. NFL still rules.

This was posted by Original That Guy over at Every Day Should Be Saturday, and I thought it summarized the best defense of college football versus the NFL:

“The NFL is porn, college football is sex.

One features professionals, of undeniable proficiency, in a disengaged and mercenary form of the activity leaving one more satiated than fulfilled.

The other is two idiots of considerable feeling toward one another fumbling around, even the good ones generally clueless, praying they hit the right spots. And all but the very worst of it is so much more fun.”

The gameplay in college varies wildly: it can be really exciting or really boring. It’s harder to predict than the NFL, so I like to go with what I know.

But the hypocrisy is too much to handle now, and not just the debates about paying players. Take it from someone who grew up with Penn State football as a family tradition: for years, we bragged about PSU because they won “The right way”; they didn’t have scandals; Paterno was a saint who never did anything wrong and his players graduated at high rates… even when they had their down years, fans said they’d rather stick it out with a clean program over “one of those Southern schools where players don’t go to class.” We might be a boring, mediocre Big Ten team, but we’ve got class!

And now we all know that it was pure shit and they ignored something a LOT worse than paying kids or cheating classes. Saint Joe was not the greatest human who ever walked the Earth, which was heresy to them. All that pride and integrity talk meant NOTHING. And yet, he still was probably more caring than most college coaches.

I was already pretty sick of this attitude and trying to watch crappy filed goal-dominated games before the scandal happened, and after it did, it gave me the clean break I needed. I’m glad you don’t have to worry about that shit in the NFL.

I HATE college football with a passion. Whoever says “oh, you’re ignorant for hating on college football”, no. What’s the point of rooting for a college you’ve never been to? Weak noodle arm QBs, kickers missing chip shots (I feel somewhat bad for them though), boring bowl mismatches (THANK GOD for the playoff system being implemented). No, I just don’t care. I agree with the “but college players have more heart!”. No, their objective is to get to the NFL, but I can’t blame them, that’s what they’ve always wanted to do.

I honestly don’t understand anything about college football, but I grew up in Oakland, where little people cared about it anyway (sadly, many people in the ghetto don’t go to college), and everyone either cares about the Raiders or Niners. I don’t give a rat’s ass about Cal or Stanford, my family really doesn’t have much connection to either.